


The Disappearance of Felicity Smoak

by somewhereelse



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Olicity Hiatus Fic-A-Thon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 14:27:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11315301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somewhereelse/pseuds/somewhereelse
Summary: Season 2 AU. In her haste to expose Malcolm Merlyn as the mastermind of the Undertaking, Moira Queen accidentally implicated an unknown party as hisrealaccomplice. And in her haste to provide directions to Lance, Felicity left her digital fingerprints all over the files for the Markov device. Realizing that she’s up shit creek without a paddle, Felicity disappears after Moira’s acquittal.





	The Disappearance of Felicity Smoak

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Olicity Hiatus Fic-A-Thon prompt: out of place. (So I lurk Tumblr. Sue me.)  
> 2\. Takes place generally after State v. Queen.  
> 3\. Ignore the Hollywood legal proceedings.  
> 4\. Googled so many things one shouldn’t be googling.

“What the—”

She left Starling City over a year ago and took up a life camping out in backwater towns in third world countries. As a single, white woman, it shouldn’t be this easy for her to go unnoticed in these environments, but she chooses places with frequent missionary visits and blends in enough on that front. This small town (village really), outside a once glamorous eco-resort in Costa Rica, has been like the twenty or so that have come before it. So there’s no reason for her motel room door to be slightly ajar, not when she’d locked up before leaving on a grocery run.

Hitching her messenger bag higher onto her shoulder, Felicity sinks into the shadows of the stairwell to take stock of the contents of the room. The messenger bag doubles as her go bag, but the passage of time since the last scare may have made her sloppy. It could be a standard break in—some neighborhood thieves who watched her leave in the morning and thought they’d see what the tourist has stashed away—but she’s not taking that chance. Her tablet and stack of (fake) passports are in her bag, and that’s all she needs.

She stops a floor down to drop the groceries at the door of a room where she’s seen a family then heads straight to her rented scooter. In the next town over, she can flag a taxi and hop on her tablet to book a flight. Steering around the local traffic, she runs down the memorized list of non-extradition countries she hasn’t visited in awhile. _China, not Hong Kong but the mainland... somewhere_ , she decides. After all, she’s been craving dumplings.

* * *

Oliver eases the door to the shabby room back open. Admittedly, he’s more paranoid than ever these days, but he could swear he heard footsteps stopping on the landing to this floor. The general amount of noise—playing kids, domestic disputes, probably a few drug and/or sex exchanges—masked the sound, but his instincts aren’t usually wrong. After a long beat, he concedes that the hallway is empty. And the room he’s standing in has offered as little evidence as the ones before. Aside from a duffel bag with a few changes of nondescript clothes that might be Felicity’s size, the room is bare. No electronics, no identification, not even a lingering scent.

Lyla had gotten a hit off an ARGUS satellite that happened to be overhead—he’s made a mental note to keep an eye out for any suspicious headlines about Costa Rica in the next few weeks—so he and Dig hopped on the QC plane to San José. It’s maybe the twelfth time this year that they’ve done it, and close to the twentieth overall. As usual, they’ll stake out the place for a few days to monitor movement and canvass the neighbors. Good thing Dig’s kept up with his Spanish. With a quiet sigh, he locks the door behind him and goes to track down Dig who’s booking them a hotel room.

To an extent, Oliver doesn’t know why they’re still doing this. Felicity has made it more than clear that she does not want to be found. But she’s only in this situation because of him. Because he dragged her into his crusade after making a worthless promise to Diggle that they—he—could protect her. Because his mother was cornered and desperate and pointed her finger at an accomplice she merely suspected existed. Because Laurel had lost it after Tommy’s death and Moira’s acquittal, only to redirect her fury at Malcolm’s phantom associate. And with Moira’s slip of the tongue and the traces of Felicity’s digital fingerprints on SCPD’s copy of the Markov files, there had been one obvious suspect. Who vanished, out from under his nose, hours before Laurel secured a warrant to search her house. So, yeah, they’re still chasing her, even though he’s unsure what they’ll do when they find her because there’s still an active warrant for Felicity’s arrest in connection with the earthquake. Public outcry hasn’t settled down much, the citizens feeling as if they were robbed of closure with Malcolm’s death and Moira’s acquittal.

Eviscerating Felicity Smoak in a public trial would serve as group therapy for the entire city, so they _need_ to find her before anyone else does.

* * *

Felicity—or rather Megan Taylor—is doing her best to settle in for a long-haul flight in a cramped economy seat. Normally, she’d upgrade herself to business class because, hey, not _her_ money. But she’s already at risk of being flagged without a return ticket or any checked baggage—and how she would have  _appeared_ on the passenger manifest and all. No matter, in thirteen short hours, she’d be in Shanghai and once again safe from extradition back home.

 _Home_.

There’s a hopeless thought.

When she had overheard Laurel’s request for a search warrant for her address over the SCPD radio, Felicity went underground as a safety precaution. She’d seen what arrogance and hesitation cost Cooper and, if Laurel couldn’t be talked off this ledge, she wanted to be on the offensive and in control. So after waving off Oliver, who’d insisted on driving her home after their encounter with the Count, she packed a bag and the fake ID she’d doctored up back in college for fun, not believing she’d ever have to use it.

Then the search warrant turned up evidence that she’d accessed the Markov device files on the day of the earthquake because, by some stroke of bad luck, the SCPD servers had been automatically backing up as the city was crumbling around them, memorializing in one’s and zero’s her hasty carelessness in downloading the files since, you know, people’s lives were at stake and all. And the search warrant evolved into an arrest warrant, and, just like that, Felicity found herself on the run from charges of criminal conspiracy and 503 counts of murder. Any excuse she could offer, any explanation she could give that she had been helping shut down the second device and _not_ setting off the first, would out Oliver as the Arrow and Diggle and Lance, and maybe even Sara and Roy, as his associates, which was the last thing her friends and Starling City needed after the devastation in the Glades.

 _She_ , however, could function perfectly well on her own, even on the run. Calling up skills and connections she hadn’t used since MIT, Felicity pulled together an escape plan. Not until she was sitting in a hotel room, streaming coverage of the news conferences where Oliver and Lance futilely tried to defend her, did she register the numbness that had settled in her bones. Good thing, too, otherwise she would have been a senseless mess as she drove to Seattle in a car rented with a fake driver’s license, then flew to Salt Lake City on another, then finally to Mexico City on a brand new passport.

She had paused once in that mad scramble, a few miles past the Starling City limits sign. Maybe it’d be better to go back and face the music, strategize with her friends who she knew would do their damnedest to protect her, and refute the false accusations for what they were, because she may be guilty of a number of federal crimes but  _murder_ was not one of them. Then a highway patrol car had gone whizzing past, and she realized her window of opportunity was closing. Only later would she understand that running then, meant running  _forever_.

In the next few days, languishing in that bare hotel room, Felicity came to the belated conclusion that she could never again have a home. Laurel had whipped the Starling City residents into a fervor calling for her head, not that they needed much encouragement to get there. More alerts had gone off when SCPD elevated her missing status to the feds, after much stalling from Lance she was sure, so she’d been listening in on the back channels when the FBI connected her to Cooper Seldon, that “computer virus with an attitude problem” from all those years ago. Then, she’d spiraled for a few more days after overhearing that Cooper was still _alive_ , that the NSA had faked his death and conscripted him into working like a trained monkey for them. Pulling herself out of that black hole had been a long, hard chore, but necessary for her survival at that point. The federal government finally realized that a highly trained computer specialist on the run after being accused of the deadliest domestic terrorism incident in history was maybe bad news bears for national security. That _she_ was and is a threat to national security, one who deserves a place on the Most Wanted list right below The Calculator.

With her brain on the lowest setting possible for function, because she could _not_  think about her mom or Oliver or John or anyone else really, she bought a box of hair dye from the corner pharmacy and some colored contacts for good measure. The next day Felicity boarded her flight to Morocco as Jennifer Carter, just your average brunette with brown eyes. Her plan was—is—to keep moving, to stick mainly to non-extradition countries, to siphon money from that helpful list of corrupt assholes as needed, and to alter her appearance routinely. At least this way she would get to travel the world like she had always wanted.

* * *

Despite a pollution warning, Felicity breathed a little easier once she landed in Shanghai, knowing she was technically safe from the false accusations awaiting her on US soil. She gave herself a day to rest (and consume all the dumplings she could possibly find) before buying a train ticket to Nanjing, hoping the older, less visited city would buy her more cover.

That slight relaxation undoes all of her hard work.

She told herself that booking a first class ticket is practical, because the less people who see her the better, but really it’s her first time on a bullet train and she likes the extra leg room. She’s pulled her now dark brown, almost black, hair into a low ponytail—blue-eyed, blondes in Asian countries tend to draw more attention—and is wearing an outfit standard for business travelers—black pants and a long sleeved blouse with low heels. With a black laptop bag and a mostly empty roller suitcase, Felicity is one hundred percent certain she’s nailed down the nondescript, ex-pat, professional traveler look.

Which is why it’s a massive surprise when someone—a tall someone—looms over her in the basically empty train compartment and clears his throat to gain her attention. Felicity tries not to flinch, because that’s not _a normal_ reaction, and slowly takes him in from the corner of her eye. He’s not wearing the rumpled suit of a ticket inspector, nor is he of the slight build that’s the standard here.

No.

It’s fucking Oliver Queen, looking about ten different shades of relieved and ready to throw a temper tantrum.

“Shit,” Felicity mutters in disbelief. She kicks out at his leg in a move that surprises him more than anything, and he stumbles in the narrow aisle as she grabs her laptop bag and flies out the door and back into the crowd on the platform. She’s not sure what her next move is, because damn Oliver Queen for once again throwing her life into chaos, but she’s not getting back on that train.

“ _Felicity!_ ”

She can hear him yelling over the crowd, which causes her to roll her eyes and mumble, “Will he _shut up_?” Her real name being shouted into a crowded train station is really the last thing she needs, and it shouldn’t be that hard for him to spot her since she’s above average height here and can feel every centimeter of it. Doing her best to meld into the crowd, she makes her way toward an exit at a sedate pace. _Outside, taxi—_  Her brain won’t process further than that so she pushes on blindly.

With her eyes trained on the back of the person in front of her, she startles when someone sidles his way into her path and ends up walking into a very broad, very familiar chest. “John?” Dig has the audacity to smile at her fondly before placing both hands on her shoulders in a way that tells her she is going absolutely nowhere any time soon. It’s less than a minute before Oliver barrels up to them, red-faced and panting with suppressed rage at the crowd that cares little for his urgency.

Even as she numbly accepts Dig’s hug and observes Oliver’s jaw twitch, Felicity lets her brain run on autopilot. She’s had a few close calls before, occasionally some whippersnapper at one of the alphabet agencies gets it in their head that they’re going to bring in _the_ Felicity Smoak. Fortunately, they have no idea she still has bugs in their internal communications and can hear everything they say about her. Unfortunately, she doesn’t always get the alerts in real time or she doesn’t catch on to whatever new codename they’ve thought up for her. In any case, she’s improvised getaway plans while being chased before, and it’s not any different now that her friends are doing the chasing instead of law enforcement. With Oliver and Diggle bracketing both sides of her, she knows it has to be now, before they arrive at whatever isolated space they’ve commandeered for this lecture. Her opening is approximately twenty feet ahead, where a group of tourists are piling into charter buses. The drivers look impatient for the buses to fill up and floor it the moment the doors close. If she can just shake them loose and slide in before they drive off—

Oliver tightens his grip on her elbow, bringing all three of them to a halt. “Don’t even think about it,” he growls, and a moment later a black town car appears at the curb by some invisible signal of his. Defeated—her brain just _cannot_ compute anymore—Felicity sags in their hold until Diggle has to prop her up while Oliver opens the door. Dig pulls her in after him and Oliver squishes in on her other side instead of sitting up front, a testament to how little they trust her right now, before directing the driver to take them to some hotel. If anyone has noticed two large men hauling away a reluctant woman, well, too late now.

* * *

Diggle surveys the room with a calm he does not feel. A _mute_ Felicity—did he ever think he’d see the day?—and a distressed Oliver—did he ever think he’d see the day it wasn’t because of Laurel Lance?—are not reactions he imagined when this all began. They’ve chased her for over a year, because there’s no replacing the sense of camaraderie they’d built in that basement and because there’s no mistaking their responsibility for Felicity’s _situation_. It’s a good thing Lyla’s been so understanding of his dedication to finding Felicity, since it’s not unlike their dedication to troubled members of their units.

Which is why he knows that Oliver, in his desperate attempt to break through to her, is doing more harm than good as he blowhards all over the hotel room. Felicity’s only response to his many, many variations of the command to  _come home_ has been a resolute _no_. 

“Felicity?” he interjects, cutting Oliver off mid-demand. The other man sends him a look of incredulity, but Dig tilts his head at him with an obvious _get out_ expression. Oliver takes the hint (not before growling and throwing his hands up in frustration) and walks out onto the small balcony. After sitting on the edge of the bed closest to her chair, since this all feels too much like an interrogation, he reaches out to pat her hand. “It’s good to see you.”

His reward is a faint smile and an answering pat. “You, too, Dig. That overbearing idiot—” she jerks a thumb at the French doors— “not so much.” The chuckle bursts out of his chest before he can even stop it, not that he wants to. Damn, he’s missed her. “How did you find me?”

He doesn’t want to answer because she’s only asking for the sake of future evasive maneuvers, but that’s not what their friendship is based on. “ARGUS happened to have a satellite on Costa Rica. It picked you up so Oliver and I jumped on a plane to San José. We tracked you from there. I have to say, I thought for sure we’d lose you on the ground here but—”

“Dumplings.” He can hear the eye roll in her voice. “I was going to take the train right after I landed, but _dumplings_.”

“Bless your stomach, Felicity Smoak,” he responds with the utmost sincerity. First, she was the only person in the foundry who wasn’t immune to hunger pains and so forced them all to regularly eat during vigilante’ing. Second, it was probably the only thing keeping them from missing her by mere hours since they’d had to stop to refuel in Los Angeles. “Why don’t you want to come home?”

Her face crumbles in a way that makes his stomach drop, and her next words are wrenched from her throat in a way that makes his soul angry. “ _I can’t_ , John. I can’t ever come home.”

“Why not?” His question is gruff and incredulous. Not since the aftermath of the earthquake, when he found her trembling in a pile of rubble, has he ever wanted to lash out against the world for hurting the woman he considers his sister.

“I’m a wanted murderer,” Felicity laughs through what sounds like tears but she’s hidden her face from him. “How am I ever supposed to go back? I have no alibi, no reason for being in the Markov device files. I can’t ask you or Oliver or Lance to testify for me because then everyone’s outed about Team Arrow business. No, I won’t let someone else take the fall for me. Not again.”

“What are—” he clears his throat to stay on topic— “we are coming back to that _not again_ part. We can get you home, Felicity. Why do you think we’re here? Why do you think we’ve been trying to find you ever since you disappeared?”

Felicity levels him with a hard stare. “You mean you haven’t been chasing me halfway around the world without a plan for over a year?” He averts his gaze to avoid answering and shake off the discomfort from meeting her _brown_  eyes. Then after a brief look of victory, she inhales deeply. “And do you mean to tell me that all this time I thought I was evading the feds, it was really just you two?”

“Halfway? I think we’ve made a few round-trips by now,” he deadpans, an eyebrow involuntarily raising. “And we’ve always had a plan. It was to get you home. The _how_  just changed from time to time.” Dig takes her eye roll in stride before moving onto her other question. “It was mostly the feds. We piggybacked off them a lot and got hits off ARGUS satellites sometimes. Turns out it’s really hard to track down your missing IT specialist when your IT specialist is missing.” Felicity’s lips twitch at his play on words, and it gratifies him a little. Her unresponsiveness is... concerning. She’s not near the level of Oliver when he first got off that island—or for that matter, himself after a tour—but he’s noticed a number of defenses that weren’t there before and that should have _never_ been given reason to exist.

After a deep breath, she finally turns her eyes to meet his, and he’s surprised by the alacrity there given that her first instinct was to flee from _Oliver_ of all people. “So what’s this plan?”

“Lyla’s in charge of ARGUS now,” her eyes widen but he carries on before she can ask the obvious question, “We can explain what happened to Waller another time. Anyway, I don’t suppose you noticed that of all the government agencies trying to bring you in, ARGUS was never one of them?” Dig waits for her to nod in confirmation, “Basically, Lyla will... do what Lyla does—I don’t have details—and call off the other agencies. Before you argue, Lyla knows what happened, and she’s offered to do it because you’re _innocent_. It’s not a favor, it’s not me getting my girlfriend to bend the law. It’s simply her wanting to right a wrong.”

Felicity’s eyes are wet with tears, telling him that it’s been a long time since she’s known kindness, or hasn’t been suspicious of the person offering it. Not wanting to bring attention to it, he forces himself back on topic. “The SCPD arrest warrant is a little trickier than that. Basically, it’s still outstanding because no one’s had reason to quash it. Laurel is—she’s not in a good place. After you disappeared, she hit the bottle and some prescription drugs pretty hard. She was disciplined by the bar for unethical behavior after showing up to a trial completely blitzed, and Lance had to force her into rehab.”

“That’s terrible,” she whispers, and Dig is struck by the reminder that these things aren’t the norm for some people, and that Felicity Smoak’s capacity for empathy is astounding. “Is she out of rehab yet? Oh god, does Oliver hate me?”

His eyebrows raise in complete surprise. “Why would Oliver hate you for that?”

“ _Gorgeous Laurel_ ,” her hands flutter around as if that’s an explanation, “You know, she blamed him for Tommy’s death. She probably blamed him for the jury acquitting Mrs. Queen. I figure it’s not a leap for her to blame him for my disappearance, and the rest of the cluster that happened to her life after. Just one more bad memory for Laurel to associate with Oliver, when he’s been half-obsessed with redeeming himself to her.”

 _No, he’s been fully obsessed with finding his Girl Wednesday._ Dig doesn’t express the thought, just blinks slowly at her. “No, Oliver doesn’t hate you for what’s going on with Laurel,” he finally responds, deciding to change the subject. “She’s finished rehab, and Lance is keeping a close eye on her. The point is, the last few cases she handled before being admitted were thrown out for all intents and purposes. Lance covered for you, said you had remotely accessed the files at his request. They suspended him again for working with the Arrow, but with how depleted the forces are, it didn’t last. Some people haven’t gotten over it, but after they failed to find any more evidence against you, the case was put on hold for lack of a better term. I don’t think the DA’s office wants to pursue it, but they also won’t want to reward you for running. So that’s the piece we’ll have to figure out.”

“I ran for _nothing_?” He’s not surprised by the anger in her voice. Dig has zero doubts that Felicity has been capably providing for herself financially, but the mental expense of living on the run has taken its toll. “All of that and I should have just stayed.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dig admits with some reluctance. “Right now, things are quiet, and people are in places they weren’t a year ago. If you had stayed, with how bad things were, I don’t know that the SCPD and the DA’s office wouldn’t have just railroaded you into a “deal” or something. But maybe if you’d left us a way to contact you, this could have been over a few months ago.”

Felicity starts shaking her head, almost frenetically. “No, no. It wasn’t safe. I couldn’t—it would have— _everyone_  could have—”

“Okay, okay,” he’s quick to soothe, slipping to his knees next to her chair. “It’s alright. We’re here now, and we’re going to get you home. You _do_ want to come home, right?”

With a few deep breaths, she manages to compose herself. Dig is both proud and depressed that she’s learned how to do that on her own. “Yes, I want to go home,” her voice is surprisingly steady, “But I don’t want to—I don’t want to just reappear. That’s not going to go over well, I think.”

“Right. Oliver’s been in contact with Jean Loring. You remember the Queen’s criminal defense attorney? Really says something about that family that they just keep one on retainer,” he shakes his head, pleased when she manages a small laugh. “Loring can set up a meeting with the DA. She’s new, much less vindictive than Donner and less obsessed than Laurel, so there’s a good chance she’ll be reasonable. Might need a little Queen family influence to quash the warrant, though.”

“Somehow, I’m okay with that,” Felicity chuckles, already looking years younger.

“Good.” Dig moves to sit in the other chair with an air of satisfaction. “Are you okay with the overbearing idiot coming back in, too? I think he’s going to pace right off that balcony soon.”

* * *

She has bare seconds to brace herself before Oliver rushes up to them in response to Dig calling his name. He comes to an abrupt stop in front of the two chairs, and he’s _visibly_  anxious. His shirt is askew, hair mussed, and he’s actually wringing his hands together. “When—” he seems to notice the harsh demand in his voice and starts again— “I mean. Have you made a decision?”

After a brief glance at Dig who nods in encouragement, she closes her eyes. Felicity feels bad that he’s waiting on bated breath, but the words aren’t coming as easily as she thought. “Would you please—please ask Jean Loring to meet with the DA?”

His forehead scrunches up as he processes her words because he clearly expected a more straightforward answer than that. “Oh thank god,” Oliver breathes a moment later before just about falling on her in relief. Prior to abandoning her life, Felicity had, during errant daydreams, wondered what it would be like to wear Oliver Queen as a blanket, but the setting isn’t quite like she imagined.

“Heavy,” she grunts when her lungs compress, and he straightens with a mumbled apology, face reddening while Diggle chuckles lowly.

“I’ll call her in a few hours. It’s still the middle of the night back home.” Felicity watches as his face does _something_  before he marvels, “Home. You’re coming home.”

The concept rushes through her with an almost electric charge, and a smile splits her face. “Yes, I am.”

* * *

Falling into bed, he stares at the door across the room connecting his room to Felicity’s.

She hadn’t wanted to stay in the suite he and Dig had been sharing so he’d switched out for two adjoining rooms, not wanting to be any further from her than that. While Felicity has refused to leave until Jean has quashed the warrant, Dig had a more optimistic approach. He took off almost immediately to coordinate with Lyla and find Felicity a new, _secure_  place to live.

(When it became obvious that Felicity wasn’t coming back—and SCPD finally conceded there wasn’t any evidence to be found—they carefully cleaned out her townhouse, transferring the contents to a nearby storage unit. It was good timing since the next day a mob of angry citizens noticed the lack of police tape and vandalized the place. He really hoped her landlord had good property insurance.)

It’s been an awkward two days of just the two of them, full of conference calls at odd hours with Jean and her team and uncomfortable silences to fill the gaps. Felicity is no longer an expert babbler, no longer bright and shiny in the way that he remembers. In certain moments, she’s still undeniably _Felicity_ , but mostly she’s reticent and withdrawn. It adds to the fleeting sensation of the circumstances, that at any moment she’ll disappear again and he’ll spend forever chasing a ghost around the world. He figures it won’t feel _real_ until she’s safely back in Starling with them, working days at QC and nights in the foundry like she’s never left.

A knock sounds on the connecting door, and he calls out “Come in!” without second thought. He’s left his door unlocked with the latch not fully engaged and deliberately hasn’t checked if she’s returned that trust by leaving her side unlocked. She pokes her head in first, and the dark hair throws him off for a split second as it’s been doing since he laid eyes on her. At least she took out the brown colored contacts that first day, after he and Dig unintentionally recoiled whenever she made eye contact with them. He’s not even sure how he even spotted her on that train, other than some kind of bone-deep Felicity-radar.

“You’re still awake,” she states obviously, lingering at the door. With a small smile, he waves her forward, and she nears to perch on the desk chair next to his bed. He’s found himself smiling more, touching her more, hoping that she’ll reciprocate with her usual brand of warmth, because this closed-off woman can't be permanent. (He will figure it out if she is. He will take any version of Felicity he can get.) Results have been inconclusive. “I haven’t,” she takes a deep breath, and he hates the hesitation that’s become normal for her, “I wanted to ask about everyone else. How they’re doing. I didn’t forget about them.”

“They’re good,” he nods uncontrollably, feeling like a bobble head. Without Felicity’s babbling to distract them, he’s taken on the mantle of awkward nerves for days. “Thea’s running Verdant still, Roy helps. With that and the Arrow’ing. They know about me being the Arrow now, that’s new-ish. Sara sends a message every once in a while. She’s... alive, I guess.”

“That’s good. It’s good. Good.” This time, Felicity nods as if reassuring herself. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be weird. It’s just—I’ve been on my own for so long, not as long as you were, obviously. I just mean it’s been awhile since I’ve had someone to talk to. A friend.”

Oliver grabs onto her hands before he even realizes he’s reached out, and thankfully she doesn’t flinch away. “I know what you mean. Survival mode,” he breathes, because he does know it well and it’s something he never wanted for Felicity.

“How is—how’s Laurel doing? Dig told me a little.” Oliver’s breathing feels a little shallow under the weight of his guilt that’s gone from brutal to crushing. He can hear the recrimination in her voice, understands it’s the same misplaced blame he shouldered and she and Dig always tried to talk him out of. Which is what he needs to do for her.

“That’s not your fault,” he responds adamantly. “Laurel’s decisions are her own, and maybe a little bit genetics. If she hadn’t fixated on you, it could have been someone else, someone who didn’t have the ability to take care of themselves like you did. Laurel might not have been in her right mind but she’s still a very good lawyer and she could have ruined some innocent person’s life.”

“She _did_ ,” Felicity interjects with not a small amount of incredulity and building anger. Oliver runs over the last part in his mind and realizes where he went horribly wrong.

He holds up shaking hands to stave off her Loud Voice. “No. That’s _not_ —I just meant she wasn’t going to stop until someone paid for the earthquake. Her hitting bottom after you disappeared isn’t something you should ever feel guilty about. Laurel ending up in rehab is not your responsibility, especially after what she did to you.” The fight bleeds out of her, and he feels terrible for taking even that away from her. However much she deserves to feel angry for being a victim of circumstance, he knows too well how destructive that anger can be.

* * *

“You’re right.” Felicity tests the words on her tongue. She hates making that admission just as much as she knows Oliver hates making it. “This is all just a series of unfortunate events, right? That Tommy’s mom was the victim of senseless violence. That Malcolm turned that grief into a psychotic quest for revenge against half of the city. That Tommy died. That Laurel went on a witch hunt after. That I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I keep looking back, trying to find someone to blame, I’m never going to move forward.”

His eyes are wide, presumably in shock at her mature response. Hell, she’s blown away by that response. Though it’s one thing to say it, it’ll be another thing to see how she copes with being back in Starling. If Jean can even get her back there. Maybe all she’ll get is Lyla calling off the feds, and she’ll have to live forever with an arrest warrant from Starling City—the first place she _chose_ as her home—hanging over her head. Maybe Oliver and Dig will visit her in Vegas or wherever she ends up.

On cue, Oliver’s cell phone rings on the bedside table, the screen lighting up with Jean’s name. He accepts the call and places it on speaker, letting Jean know she’s there in lieu of actually greeting the overworked woman. By her estimation, it’s around two in the afternoon on Friday back in Starling, and Jean has been negotiating with the DA’s office for at least the last thirty-six hours. She has no idea what the attorney is holding as leverage, but they have been oddly receptive and engaged in the conversation, considering that she’s evaded arrest for over a year.

In the end, it’s anti-climactic. For some reason she’s desperate to look into, the DA agrees to quash the warrant and backdate it to coincide with the internal investigation into Detective Lance, when he testified that she’d been assisting him. She packs her meager belongings and boards the QC plane with Oliver. On arrival, an immigration official boards the plane to check their passports, and she hands over Jessica Sullivan’s, the first alias she’d used to fly to Mexico City. Oliver looks at her in confusion, but she ignores him because technically, _officially_ , they could never prove  _Felicity Smoak_ left the country. The official leaves, and Oliver holds out _her_ passport with a sheepish smile of apology. She knows he must have taken it from her house, _from her underwear drawer_ , and she almost passes out in mortification.

Waiting for them isn’t the angry mob she had nightmares about, but three people she’s excited to see. Dig follows up his ear-to-ear smile with a bear hug that ends almost too quickly. Lyla is sincerely pleased by her safe return, if not uncomfortably pregnant (she punches Dig in a massive bicep for not telling her and for leaving his pregnant girlfriend to go on a wild goose chase looking for her). Lance greets her with a brusque hug and a gruff _I’m so_   _sorry_  that causes her to tear up.

After a Big Belly stop, they—minus Lance who was needed back at the station—caravan to the new apartment Dig scouted for her. It’s a short-term rental, in case it’s not to her liking, in a brand new high rise with some serious lobby security. Dig and Lyla pulled her bed and wardrobe from storage, but they left everything else so she can make her own decisions. And she has plenty of decisions to make since Oliver never stopped paying her salary and there’s a sizable amount waiting in her savings account. The world of possibility open to her, especially without any warrants or Most Wanted lists, should spike her anxiety and nerves—she’s never done well without a plan—but eating burgers in a half-empty apartment with the two best friends she’s ever had and the woman who helped bring her back settles Felicity, makes her feel like she has another chance at a  _home_.

Until two months later when frakking Oliver Queen throws her life into chaos once again.

Team Arrow has just gotten accustomed to having her down in the foundry every night again (okay, fine, that took all of a week, and it was mainly getting Thea and Roy to stop providing comments from the peanut gallery), she’s just settled into her new position as a project manager in QC’s Applied Sciences department (the promotion/demotion was side-eyed by many but she proved her worth in no time), the general population is just getting used to not wanting her drawn and quartered (the Starling City Times printing Laurel’s apology for the hasty and ultimately false accusation went a long way), when, after a successful night of Arrow’ing, this happens:

“Felicity, would you like to go out to dinner with me? Like a date?”

“What the—” She’s fallen out of her chair in shock and can hear Thea and Roy snickering in the background. The world tilts, like that day in Costa Rica when her room door was cracked open, and she fights the urge to run again, because she doesn’t need to do that anymore. Oliver appears to grab onto her arms and haul her up to her feet, steadying her once more. “Um, yes.”


End file.
